editing – Moody Narwhal Writes

Hello everyone!

During the month of April, I was a contestant in TeenPit (https://khopkinswriter.wordpress.com/2019/02/05/welcome-to-teenpit-class-of-2019/), and I got a lot of good advice from the contest!

For those of you who don’t know what TeenPit is, it’s a contest specifically aimed towards teenaged writers. To apply, writers send their first page and short pitch to the blog. Those who make it to the next round get a mentor (or two). The mentors help edit the first chapter, and then the entries are sent back to the judges.

I didn’t win the contest, but I did get two mentors and I think I got the best part of the experience!

One of my mentors is an editor and a previous Pitch Wars mentor. My other mentor was a contestant in Pitch Wars and has written a lot of books. This made me extra happy to have them as my mentors, considering that I plan to enter Pitch Wars.

Overall, they were really helpful! Just looking over my first chapter they helped me decide which POV I wanted to continue in and whether my novel was YA or MG. Then they looked at my synopsis and helped me address some larger scale issues, such as the characters not driving the plot and whether I needed to include a romance for it to fit into YA.

With their help, I decided to switch from having an omniscient third person POV to having many third person limited POVs, usually one per scene. This gives me the depth of being able to get in all the character’s head, but it eliminates the confusion of having omniscient POV. The mentors also took into consideration the fact that I want to be published, and said that there is very little (or no) market for YA omniscient POV nowadays.

I also decided to call my book YA and leave out a romance. It had been a concern of mine that most YA books have a romance, even if it’s kinda just thrown in there. However, I wanted to avoid this because I wanted to focus on non-romantic character relationships as well as keeping the focus on the plot, setting, and otherwise (in my opinion) more interesting elements of the story.

Since talking to them, I’ve cut a lot of words from my novel that didn’t really do anything for the story. I cut an entire chapter and replaced it with a shorter version, and I’ve cut countless paragraphs and boring scenes. So far, I’ve cut almost 10k, although it does fluctuate a little when I rewrite scenes or occasionally add one.

I was really happy with the experience and I encourage you (if you’re a teenager, of course) to enter the 2020 contest! It was such a helpful experience and I hope it’s brought me closer to being able to enter Pitch Wars and hopefully, get closer to being able to query!

Thanks for reading everyone!

Hello everyone!

No short stories today, unfortunately. I should have a snippet of something to post soon though! I’ve already written it, but I’m going to show it to some friends first. In the meantime, let’s talk Camp NaNoWriMo!

If you don’t know what it is, here’s the link: https://campnanowrimo.org/ I like to think of it as a more flexible version of NaNoWriMo, where you set your own goal with any kind of writing project you like. The first time I participated was in April of last year, when I hand wrote 50 pages. I joined about halfway through the month, but it was a good experience for me and I enjoyed it a lot.

For this year, I want to do the second draft of my book from start to finish! It’s a big goal, I know, and I’ll probably have to give up television again like I did for NaNoWriMo. I should be less unwilling to give up TV, but oh well.

Since January I’ve been slowly reading through my first draft and marking everything I think needs to change. I finished last Sunday and reading my ending gave me many feels. Many good feels, but they were still there. To be honest, the ending is my favorite part and the part that will change the least. I find that interesting as it’s the first ending I’ve ever written. I wrote a lot of beginnings and some middles, but it was the first ending I’ve gotten through and it makes me happy that it’s a good one.

So, I’m not sure exactly how this is going to work out but I’ll see. I’m going to guess that some days are going to go faster than others, like if I only need to fix a few sentences in a chapter that’ll be a whole chapter done. I do have a few scenes I want to add and a few I want to cut, and I know the general direction I want to go in. I have 117k written right now, so if I want to finish by the end of April that would mean going over 3,900 words a day. I think it’ll be easier to fix what I want in those 3,900 words than it would be to write them, but I think some days I’ll go over and some I’ll go under. I won’t beat myself up if I don’t finish by May (although it would be lovely.)

So here’s what I want to fix: One of my MC’s needs a better character arc. She’s a Muslimah hijabi which to me makes it extra important that I portray her the right way. Right now I feel she’s just too awkward and forced to be quiet and I want to give her a little more of her own voice throughout the story. The other major problem I have is that in the middle of the story and a little towards the end, there’s a lot of repetition. I wanted to enforce that the characters are confused and don’t know what’s going on, but I really ended up saying ‘they had no idea’ over and over again. That’s something I need to fix in this draft by using more unique of ways of describing the character’s feelings.

Those are the two main problems that run through the whole novel. The other things I want to change are more of isolated incidents, so hopefully it won’t be too much of a struggle to fix everything. I should have another update once I’ve gotten into the swing of things!

Thanks for reading and I hope Camp goes well for you if you’re also participating!

Tag: editing

My 2019 TeenPit Experience + Editing My Novel

My Camp NaNoWriMo April 2019 Plan